Hi. If you have read any of my blog posts in the last few years, you know that I have been a bit quiet lately. There are many reasons for that, and maybe I will get into all of them at some point (not quite ready). But something coming up has me breaking the silence, if only because the trajectory of it has been the landscape of the last 3 years of my life and now it is finally seeing the light of day. Mycelial was concept proposed 3 years or more ago by my long time collaborator Erica Mott. It started with an email asking for some language regarding what I would do with a big data set like all the tweets in #Egypt, #Occypy, or #BLM, to create a sound score. I think I made up something quite elaborate, if not slightly general, for a grant application, but inside my mind, my answer was really “look for help” as I really didn’t have the first clue. So Erica started doing her magic of finding the right people and putting us all in a room together. Some of those rooms were physical, but many were virtual. These included programmers, cell phone app designers, user experience and VR game designers, activists and organizers, and communications scholars among many others. When the grant application transformed into a project, and then the project was suddenly supported by the US Embassy in Cairo, the group of collaborators became bigger. We became very focused on one particular dataset (#Egypt) which was the hashtag used by the protesters in Tehir square. And we started working with lots of Egyptians. As the team grew in Chicago some very creative and tenacious people at the US Embassy in Cairo proposed a very integrated cross cultural collaboration in which each US collaborator has an Egyptian counterpart. The next thing you know, we were embroiled in a series of residencies in Chicago and Egypt that was to culminate in performances in Cairo, Chicago. It seemed like a dream come true for us with solid support from a strong cultural institution. Of course, a sudden change in leadership in Washington left the US State department in total disarray. The subject of another blog post all together, but I would say we were possibly some of the first casualties of the trump administration. But there we were. Now many eyes from many different disciplines were staring into the void of 12 million tweets in an excel spread sheet that was bigger in file size than most audio files on my hard drive.

The name Mycelial refers to a living network of fungal strands that connect vast forest floors. Research has shown that these strands become almost like neural networks sending messages across great distances connecting the forest and helping it thrive. The analogy being explored here is that social networks, and social media have become a form of neural network for large movement and social movements and that something about the ebb and flow of information across the globe has helped them thrive. But there are invisible layers that might not be so obvious and the question of what those layers are and represent is kind of the bigger question being posed. So we started with the a dataset to ask that question.

What does it mean to make music or to make dance from a dataset? What would one expect to extract from it and what is the human meaning of such a large swath of information? From what angle do you approach this kind of data? Of course, nobody can possibly really “see” what 12 million tweets really means just by reading it. It’s not like reading a novel or a poem and then using it as inspiration for music. After several conversations with creative coders and programmers, we had several methods and ideas for things we could do to directly “auralize” different aspects of the feed, but what we found was missing in all of these approaches was a way in which we could reflect the emotional content hidden in the millions of individual statements being made as well as how those emotions spread over the glob as they were “re-tweeted” over a series of social networks. Don’t worry. We found a solution. It had many caveats, but before I get into that. I wanted to talk a bit about the amazing people involved in the project and the incredible contributions they made.

Hugh Sato:

Hugh is the glue and in many ways, the backbone of the project. A strong audio and visual installation artist, we met when he created the walk in installation for 3 Singers at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. One of many things in that project that I mercifully had very little hand in, it was not until after the project was done that I got a chance to really get to know him. He acted as user experience designer for both live performative instruments used in the piece as well as audience driven installation elements. But more than that, he also spearheaded the analysis of the dataset we used, wrote hours and hours of code that allowed phones to talk to projection, and devised method for audio visual interaction based on ideas coming from the entire group. It was Hugh that managed the team of Egyptian collaborators who helped develop visual content and he was a general sounding board for almost every aspect of the piece. I feel very fortunate to have met him and worked with him. His energy is always positive and he is always willing to try almost any crazy idea.

Tony Reimer and John Toenjes:

A composer and sound designer based in Champaign, Illinois, Tony was introduced into the project as we planned to integrate a new app that he was working on with John Toenjes at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the U of I in Urbana-Champaign. It started as a kind of “beta test” of thesoftware, but their involvement soon became fundamental to the process as they began developing all sorts of custom functionality specifically for the piece. The app “MoSho” that they eventually have released is a means of driving content on cell phones that join a network and open a specific “show” or “event”. It is what drives the cell phone portion of Mycelial. We spent lots of time experimenting with and testing different potential functions between the live sound, motion capture for the dancers, and what eventually would show up on the phone as well as ways for text and images input by the audience to end up on screens in the performance space in near real time. Their contribution became much more than helping us program an app. Their experience using this app in shows they had made over the years helped inform the flow of different parts of the piece and their expertise was generally invaluable finding solutions. Tony, Hugh, and I spent many a long weekend coding, testing, and listening to music and

the support of the other two in a quiet and respectful work environment gave us the combined brain strength to overcome the many hurtles that were needed in the crafting of the various technological instruments. John was kind of our spirit guide often just turning us on to a piece of code or something we had not heard of or giving us access to things we would not have otherwise had, (including getting different university professors to answer our emails).

Liviu Parese

Clearly loving to be identified by his distinct style of projection art rather than his physical presence (I could not find one picture of him online but lots of his art), Liviu developed and integrated the video imagery that was collected by many participants during 2 trips to Cairo and several trips to the internet. He has also been instrumental in integrating and coordinating the many visual cues with the sound score and cell phone input as so much of it happens in tandem or interdependently and his challenge became to make all of what was being input in the phones fit to the multiple projection mapped space as the piece unfolds.

Then there was the Egyptian team of technicians and programmers that worked with each of the above artists.

Ziad Osama (programmer) is an undergraduate studying Computer Engineering at the American University in Cairo. Ziad is an engineer by day; a creative coder by night. He found his passion in computer vision and interactive artworks. What is art without engineering and what is engineering without art, Ziad wonders. He also cofounded Creative Coding Cairo.

Badr AlKhamissi (programmer) is a developer/artist/ researcher hybrid in the making. He is currently a Computer Science senior in the American University in Cairo. Passionate about Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Creative Coding, Badr worked on several projects that focus on the overlap between Art and Technology. He is a cofounder of the Creative Coding Cairo Community.

Yasser Nazmy (UI/UX Designer) from Cairo, Egypt, he graduated from the German University in Cairo, with a BA in Graphic Design from the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Arts. An avid bookworm and comic book enthusiast, he developed an early passion for fantasy, history, and classical folklore. As a design student, he is in a continuous process of graphical research specialising in poster design, patterns, typography and vintage aesthetics. Despite having various interests he is mostly interested in interaction and information design applications tackling contentious topics in the Arab region. As a professional designer, he has designed services that aim to solve many of Egypt’s infrastructure related problems in the fields of education, museum

This creative team of technical artist all worked together to make almost every aspect of the piece work from creating and editing content to writing applications that allowed the phones to send images and text to the screens, perfecting the motion capture systems that allowed the dancers to control the sound-score and visual landscape with their body, or interpreting the dataset we colleted along the way, there was really no part of the piece that did not involve 2 or more of the minds on the list. When thinking back on all of it, my mind is literally boggled and given how many ideas were tried that did not make it to the piece I believe we may have a library of code to mine for future projects that will help generate new work for all involved down the road.

In today’s world of easily networked programming it was not hard to send messages to one another across closed networks. But what WAS challenging was getting the various programs, computer languages, and ways of thinking about the material being used to actually make sense and work together. How do you create a unified artistic vision that gives direction and meaning to every part? How do you get systems that are developed in disparate quarters of space and time to suddenly come together and accomplish a certain goal? And at what point does the digital scotch tape begin to fail holding it all together and what is left when that happens? It is true that the people working on this project together all work at a high level in their own rite, but finding the commonalities of working process was almost more pointed in this case than working with different types of performing artists or collaborators in non-technical fields. I many collaborations, even artists that do not share a spoken language can come together by showing each other what they do. In coding, it is often a bit more esoteric as you are creating something out of something that cannot yet be visualized or heard. Though many people use similar programming languages, there are different ways of thinking and different conventions that result in different kinds of art. It is almost like within the creative coding world there are different “genres” that have different tools and conventions that everyone in that genre knows. I guess you could say, they are different cultures. So how do you get different cultures to come together for a unified purpose.

If this seems to have a familiarity to the subject matter at hand, it was not lost on the creative team. Our process was eerily similar to the social movements we were investigating. We all just kind of showed up one day and started occupying spaces together. Rehearsal halls, living rooms, storage closets in the back of computer science departments, common areas in our hotel rooms, bars, restaurants, and coffee shops. We met in pairs, trios, quartets, and large groups. We worked hard together and tried to understand one another, but also tried to celebrate the fact that we could just be together and have the freedom to create. But at the same time we were following many threads. I was practicing and editing sound score with the dancers while simultaneously troubleshooting body tracking cameras and trying to get the sound to work. Hugh would be up on a ladder or piece of scaffolding while simultaneously giving notes on something being projected on a screen. Tony, Badr, and Nassir would be huddled around a computer screen trying different things on their phones while I would be sending Tony files to plug into the cell phone software, all the while, Erica would attempts to keep focus and shape and craft the choreography while trying at the same time to understand and visualize something that was going to be on the screen.

So, if this sounds a bit like a circus, it actually really was. But the more I have heard about the environments on the ground in many a bygone social movement in the US and around the world, it all sounds like that. People who have never met just show up and try to organize in a place. They are from different backgrounds and have often very different reasons for being there but have decided to unify for a singular moment to fight for what they believe. Often these kinds of movements are allergic to centralized leadership. And in another sense, though many are sure of what they are fighting against, it is not always so clear what they are fighting FOR. Only that things can be better.

And so in this sense, we were together. A tenuous group with so much creative energy poring forth and a spiritual vision of what we were making (notwithstanding the many multi-layered google spreadsheets we had created to try and turn that spiritual vision into a unified reality).

So, how do I describe this work?

Lets start with the different parts.

To me, this piece was like building a new genre or ensemble more than just making a piece. We know what an orchestra is and some of us know what a Baroque orchestra is or a classical or modern orchestra is. We know in general what a Jazz combo consists of and what a standard 5 piece rock band is like. But we don’t have much of a handle on what parts make up the multi-media performance ensemble.

Body Tracking Cameras:

So in the case of the cameras, it starts with Erica, myself, and the dancers. We started developing the body tracking system years ago (in preparation for 3 Singers). Once certain limitations of the system I had developed were identified, Hugh Sato began to develop more sophisticated modes of tracking using different kinds of cameras (Kinnect v2, web cams, and finally, IR security cameras). That technological hurtle took many years and was developed in tandem with the development of the work so it is hard to really state easily what came first.

But I should first talk about the performers involved.

Chris Knowlton, Carlos Lopez, Nejla Yatkin are all dancers who have been with us developing the piece and even travelling to Cairo and taking part in other residencies. The 4 dancers that have participated and are now performing in the piece actively, Sylvita Diaz-Brown, Mounir Saeed, Ezzat Ismeal, and shaymaa shoukry. 3 Are Egyptian dancers from Cairo, and one is a Chicago based dancer and performance artist. I have developed a more than usually intimate relationship with this group of performers.

As is normal with my work, I have tried to develop moments where the performers and I (as an electronic performer up in the heavens) find ways to breathe and express as one. In this case, a series of motion tracking techniques have been used to turn their movement into sound starting with some techniques I had developed for 3 Singers but ended up on the cutting room floor and ending with a brilliant system developed by Hugh Sato incorporating 4 security cameras to give each dancer their own “zone” on stage that responds to their overall velocity in any direction. Because it is the overall velocity measured by changes in pixel movement across an X/Y plane, it is actually important that their whole body be engaged. The more of their body that moves (from the core) the more it invokes the sound that it is controlling. This requires a very different way of moving and a very different way of thinking about a composition. Really you are creating structured improvisations for dancers who are trying to evoke a particular emotion. They have to feel where their body creates stillness and where the boundaries are. This process requires a dialogue between the electronic performer and the dancer that is often quite non-verbal but more based on the connection between the eye, the body of the dancer, and the musical instinct of the performer. It can be an extremely frustrating connection to make as it can be difficult to get the different reactive parameters that can be adjusted to their “sweet spot” for each dancers depending on the light, the height of the camera, and the specific way in which they dance. It is easy to give up home and simply say “this thing isn’t working”. But it is also a challenge to perfect the technology itself and find the balance between learning and perfecting the instrument as it is and finding those one or two tweaks that will make it do what is desired. Figuring out what is desired can also be a hidden factor in the process that is less easy to define. The fact that we went through 5 iterations of the system over the course of 3 years says something about this challenge.

It is also a creative struggle.

I don’t love to use the word struggle when it comes to creativity, but lets face it, all collaborations can be a struggle. Those that have followed our work together (Erica Mott and myself) have likely heard the word “inter-dependence” over and over again. This term is really one that could apply to almost any multi-disciplinary collaboration. Any time you are creating choreography that goes with music, you create a form of interdependence. The way the choreography will unfold is dependent on the nature of the music, but at the same time, what the music needs to do is dependent on the needs of the choreography. Often times, it’s just so much easier to choreograph to a known or found piece of music for this reason. It just keeps the conversation more simple because it isn’t really a conversation. But when you are creating something specific, there is always a kind of game of chicken going on as to who makes the first move. Often times the choreography needs something to get it going but without knowing the full choreographic idea, it is hard to gauge what is the best strategy. All we have to communicate the vision at this point is words. Words always fail us. Over time and many revisions, the vision becomes more clear and, in a good collaboration, it becomes easier for the participants to work efficiently and effectively as they see where it is going and start to “breathe” together.

Now imagine adding a human body as a shared resource to the equation. In this case, the body is not just reacting to the music, it is actually shaping the music itself. The body itself becomes a musical instrument, but at the same time, it must serve the choreographic purpose. This takes time. It also takes the total buy in of the performers and lots of patience on the part of the performers, choreographer, and composer while they discover the artistic possibilities of the interactive instrument from which the movement material will be crafted. In this sense, the art of “composing” the sound score and choreography is more about shaping and guiding improvisation than about dictating movement. The whole point of interaction in this way is to give the performer a creative palate to work with and then some guiding vision and idea with which to craft their individual relationship to the material. Being clear about that vision while at the same time giving the performers freedom to express themselves within it is supremely difficult and takes time, energy, and empathy. It also requires technical empathy. The technology itself will always provide hurtles, even beyond frequent failures as the technology is developed. It is often not clear when the next steps require more practice and new ideas, and when a real shift in the way the technology works is required. This path can be clouded by desire and emotion just as much as it might be clouded by some aspect of the technology not working the way it was intended. Sometimes the technology is working as it was intended, but some confusion over “intention” muddies the waters. When working on the edge of a field, even a small change can take hours upon days of re-programming. If all involved are not prepared to pore themselves into what they are trying to achieve, it can easily fall to pieces.

I know it seems I paint a tenuous and bleak picture of how the process unfolds, but I am just trying to demonstrate to the reader some of the skill, patience, and empathy that has to go to achieving what in the end hopefully seems quite simple and effortless. And when the process has been traversed by all involved, it truly can seem like magic. When I see and hear what the dancers do in this performance, it really does seem like magic to me. And just like any ensemble, we have to warm up together before every show for the magic to really unfold. I have found that on performance days when other technical or logistical elements don’t allow us to warm up together I feel more frantic and the performance seems a bit more forced. On days we do get a proper warmup, it feels like we are able to go farther expressively because we are all more comfortable and confident in the space we are in. If that sounds the same as preparing for any performance, it is. It is this that takes our “technological instrument” out of the virtual world and makes it real.

As Hugh developed the camera technology to interface with my sound generation patches, he was simultaneously developing all kinds of visual reactions that reacted in similar enough ways to how the interactive sound score worked that the same gestures would create a visual as well as a sonic reaction. I think in some ways he always had this in mind as he was developing the technology and in the end it is one of the most consistent and successful parts of the production. It is also one that I believe sets an amazing foundation for future work.

The Dataset:

The way we used the dataset we ended up focusing on really set the tone and tempo of the early parts of our collaboration and set the foundation for the structure of the entire piece.

Really the entire collaboration started when Professor Zizi Papacharissi gifted us with an excel spreadsheet containing identifying information for 12 million tweets containing #egypt, beginning January 25th 2011 and ending a month later. There was so much to interpret in this dataset that it was really overwhelming at first, so we had to enlist the help of people who analyzed and interpreted datasets as a part of what they did. We were fortunate to have some help from some very talented computer science students at UIC who formulated a “question” to ask of the dataset using a Tone Analyzer algorithm. We asked, “what are the average levels of 4 emotions (Sadness, Joy, Anger, Fear) over a 6 hour time period throughout the duration of this dataset. What came out was a chaotic mess where at first glance, it seemed all emotions where close to equal the whole time except one very obvious “spike” in joy right around February 8th. If you look up the history of the movement associated with #Egypt, you will clearly see why. But once we started to look more closely at the spikes of data and scaling them so that the minimum levels were placed relative to the maximum levels for each emotion, it seemed very apparent that all of these emotions were fluctuating all over the place. It also seemed apparent that these levels corresponded to various events during the 30 day occupation.

It is at this moment I would like to introduce to you, someone who has become my dear friend over the course of 18 months working together on this piece, co-composer, and accomplished electronic musician Ahmed Saleh.

Ahmed Saleh:

Ahmed is a very well known electronic composer in the Cairo experimental electronic scene. His music has a sensibility to popular Egyptian music forms and has a danceable quality as well as being created in collaboration with so many different traditional musicians across Egypt and elsewhere in the middle east. He is a wealth of knowledge regarding those musical forms but also a great performer and electronic improviser.

When Ahmed came into the project, I we already had the form and structure that had been given to us by the emotional analysis of the dataset, but I was really struggling with the content with which we were occupying that structure as well as how to best think about its progression. It was the infusion of his sensibilities and knowledge that really make this all start to come together. Over many conversations on the balcony of the Om Kolthoum hotel in Zamalek, we talked, drank, listened to music, and formulated a plan. In doing so, we became close friends and, I hope, we will continue to collaborate after this project is done.

Taking a step back,

After we got a set of numbers from the tone analysis algorithm, I sat and stared at the list for a while. As I mentioned before, it took some scaling and filtering of the numbers to help ascertain more meaning from them. This is in data science referred to as “filtering out the noise” as it were. Other scientists engage in another similar technique to help clarify experimental results involving large sets of data called “reparametrization”. Now where have heard that before? Once we were able to see the data more clearly, it seemed to me that there was a particular musical arc at work. It almost seem to ebb and flow in the way an all-night dance party might with small peaks here and there culminating in a really big blowout around 2/3’s of the way in. Coupled with the fact that so much of Egypt’s cultural music and so many of the social movements we had encountered had so much to do with “dance” culture (weather street dancing or electronic dance music culture), it seemed obvious that this score was somehow going to have to be fashioned like a dance party. With DJ’s. Ahmed and I both hate it when people call us DJ’s. But here we were none the less. Trying to be DJ’s. In this case, we were actually trying to get the dataset to act as a DJ.

After months of carefully curating samples that not only had some significance to use symbolically and musically representing the 4 emotions AND sounded good together, we started to create different “sample banks” that mapped to different levels of the different emotions. So when fear was off the charts, there were lots of “fear” samples, and when we reached the huge spike of joy, all the joy samples happen together, etc..

Though we spent lots of time crafting samples so that they came out in pleasing combinations, we tried to stick as close to the dataset as possible. This is how the whole arc of the piece was developed and Ahmed and I explored and excavated the different dance traditions as well as me learning an earful about Sufism, Zaar rituals, Chabi dance music, and Electro-Chabi. Where we may have “cheated” a little bit is by occasionally slowing down or speeding up the tempo of the progression through the dataset so that at certain moments the dancers could sit more in one emotion or another or so that certain stretches of time kind of accelerated or slowed down. This actually became quite a theme of the piece. How time seems to slow down or speed up depending on the specific intensity of emotions being explored. How a moment of joy seems to pass quickly when one has been waiting so long for it to come. Or how when one is waiting for change, it can seem like an eternity is passing. For us, the build up to pure joy was something we started to take as a metaphor for the trance-like dances practiced in the Sufi tradition where one dances themselves into delirium until they pass out and leave their body into the realm of pure spirituality. As one builds to achieve a long awaited goal, reality shifts slightly, but nobody really knows what is on the other side of that shift. When you come back to earth, and the euphoria begins to wear off, you can see something has changed, but often times it is difficult to define what that is. It is often really more something internal within oneself rather than a concrete outward shift. It was this shift we were trying to capture musically. As joy fades, and the unity it brought begins to fragment, the sound of the city comes back and finally envelopes the space. What is left is just the fragmented memory of what brought you to that place of unity. This seems to be the common thread of may of these social movements. Weather a tangible goal was achieved or not, the thing that everyone took from those moments was the sense of purpose and unity that they had for a moment. So after months and months of trying to make a computer be the perfect DJ (which, by the way, took two human beings a very long time to accomplish) we then began to reflect on the material we had been using in a very different way.

In February of this year, Ahmed visited Chicago and we huddled into the warmth of a studio at Columbia College to re-visit all of this material after having had almost a year away from it since finishing our Cairo residency in March of 2017. It was a very different experience from Cairo as we were cloistered in the coldest part of winter in a studio in Chicago only to travel later to an even more quiet and remote location at Bates College where we did a week long teaching residency with Erica. We decided to just freely improvise using our various tools. He with an Ableton Live session, and me with a MAX patch. The results were a series of short free improvisaitons that explored all the materials in different contexts than they had been presented and played by the “dataset”. Sort of an aftermath. A reflection. Overlaid with a series city soundscapes that were then manipulated and filtered by the dataset, we managed to create something a bit more sparse, introspective, and in a way, fulfilling. Just as these social movements experience extended periods of waiting before major events bring everyone together, so to is the period of reflection after they have run their course. Sometimes it feels like nothing changed. But under the surface, something else is brewing. I guess we have that in common right now (Egyptians and Americans). We had a moment, and it passed. And now we are just waiting to hear what comes next.

The Phones:

One of the more obvious memes being explored in the piece is the importance of social media and the cell phone as a tool of resistance. So we paired ourselves with Tony and John who have been developing a show control based cell phone app called LAIT (later MoSho). Basically, it is an app that turns your phone into a multi-media platform where content is pushed to your phone by a central server. Images can be show, sounds played, animations triggered, and interactive features such as sending text messages and “seifies” to the server that are later displayed as a part of the piece. Though we fantasized about all the different things that could possibly happen between the phones, the audience, the sound score, and the projections, we knew that all of those ideas would eventually get too complex and muddy and not serve the piece as well as overly taxing the audience with “tasks” while they are there to watch a show. Having had vast experience actually making work with the platform, Tony and John were instrumental in guiding the process and asking the right questions about when to slightly pull back or pair down a particular idea so as not to make the intersections of the phone into a distraction. Better said, they helped to work out strategies that would bring attention to the phones at the appropriate times and create a counterpoint between the different elements. Sometimes the show is about the phones, sometimes it is about the dance, sometimes the projections and sound, and at other times, about a little bit of all of the elements.

One can kind of think of the phones, projections, sound, dancers, as the different “sections” of an orchestra and the software that allows all of these sections to work together as the conductor. At almost every moment in the piece, some element of one “section” is playing a duet with another. Dancers control the sound, texts from the audience fill the screens with content, an interactive auralization of the dataset triggers both sounds of bells, chimes, and fence posts, but also sends triggers that play short animated videos. So many more things that work in tandem throughout the piece. It is like an orchestra of interdependence. During the Chicago performances, Ahmed and I even actually for a moment, becomes live “DJ’s” (like I said, we both hate that name) playing along with our sound score to give greater life to a social gathering where the audience itself becomes the dance as instructed by the phone.

As you can imagine, this system is complex. But also apparent is the fact that there is no separation between the different parts. If one aspect of the piece goes wrong, the whole thing can fall apart. At any moment, there are at least 2 pieces of technology (and two or more human beings who are responsible or performing that technology) that have to both be working properly together. Sometimes a missed button or flubbed cue in one part of the piece can cause a chain reaction of missed cues in video, sound, or on the phones themselves. Then there are the typical human and environmental elements. If the internet is slow, the phones might not react right away or even crash. This causes confusion as the process of getting back online can require more steps than one things should take. The cameras that track the dancers movement to control the sound can also be a variable from night to night as slight fluctuations in light, the height of the cameras, and the dancers energy can make them react differently from performance to performance. I actually find while performing this piece that I really need to “warm up” with the dancers. Kind of like doing my stretches, but more for my hand/ear/eye coordination as I have to adjust several different parameters during the dancers performance under the cameras. I am also controlling most of the cues at this point as all the computers are talking to each other and almost every cue has some element of sound or video that needs to be taken simultaneously. This means I have to gauge the mood and tempo of the audience as they enter the space and begin to ask questions and interact with the phones. We are already looking into ways that someone form the stage who is actually inside the group can advance some of the cues manually with their phone so as to follow the flow of the audience. This is actually not about “holding the house” in this case, but more the beginning of the actual piece. As with many technological experiments, not everything goes right every night. But the piece itself has a cohesion at this point that never lets it die, even when things go wrong. Setbacks occur, but if you don’t panic, and you persevere, you will get to that other side of joy. When the people come together in solidarity, and everyone crosses over into the joy of the moment, it is easy to forgive the small failures that are peppered along the way. The process of discovering the way and getting to that essential place is far more important than everything being perfect. Things are not always perfect in life. Finding ways to deal with imperfection is the thing that actually brings us together. In a way, it is the thing that gives us freedom. Sometimes the drive for perfection pulls us farther and farther away from what we are trying to see. I find in the arts, there is nothing more distracting than the constant fear of failure. This fear kills great ideas. This fear squelches free thought. The sign of a great artist is the ability to overcome adversity in the moment as well as the ability to perfect their craft. Performance is a moment. What one learns from the challenges and difficulties of one performance is the meat of what bubbles under the surface for the next one. One would hope that social movements that failed, or ones that succeeded but then fragmented and fizzled out, would also have the chance to go underground and learn this lesson. And perhaps what changes a performer during a challenging performance is similar to what changes a society or group of people during a challenging moment in history. Every performance of Mycelial has been a great challenge. But also has been a great source of joy as in the end, so many things that had not been tried before succeeded to work together. So many disparate parts joined in a single whole. In the end, the various species of technological plants that have grown in the forest floor have grown a Mycelial layer and that connection always makes the forest stronger.

We were very honored to have been chosen for a New Music USA project grant to help support the Chicago Premier of 3 Singers. New Music USA awards both large and small grants to individual musicians and composers creating new music and also supports the publication of “I Care if you Listen” where we were also interviewed for the lead up to the Chicago premier. Read more here.

That last 2 years of my creative life have been dominated by an all-encompassing collaborative project, namely, the 3 Singer Opera. The work was officially commissioned by the Cleveland Ingenuity festival following the 2012 festival where we (we being Erica Mott Productions which is a loose consortium of creative artists headed up by the intrepid Erica Mott, a choreographer, director, and deviser I have been working with for the past 5 years) had just given the US premier of a Duet version of 2011’s the Victory Project with the participation of the amazing and gifted video artist John Boesche. John had been added to the mix on the recommendation of our friend, mentor, and in this case, Daramaturg, Ginger Farley. Though the official invitation to create the work came from the festival in 2012, we really had started talking about it long before that. Erica had been working with sewing machines as sculptural objects on stage a few years previously and had already conceptualized a piece in which 3 performers who embodied textile factory workers, especially those who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, performed with the machines creating rhythmic structures and a constant pulse that grew and grew over the course of a performance length work. I was already getting excited about the possibilities for interaction and thinking of ways to harness the sewing machine to manipulate different aspects of sound on stage and at the same time was working with my compatriots Kyle Vegter and Dan Dehaan on our “Soundroom” project at High Concept Labs in Chicago. Soundroom was a project resulting in new concepts of how to use a space as a sound installation, but also how to imagine live electro-acoustic performance and improvisation. We built a sound installation space that could be performed in giving performers the ability to manipulate certain parts of the installation in a specific way. Through all of this, I was imagining different ways that performers on stage could manipulate their machines, that they were somehow virtually tethered to, in order to create a sense of metaphor for the machines control over the human body, or more precisely, the back and forth of development of technology to reflect human need and desire, tempered by the effect that technology has on the human body and psyche, creating a kind of socio-technological feedback loop. Of course, in this particular opera, we were looking more specifically at the way global trade effects one particular situation, that then migrates around the globe, namely, human desire for cheap clothing resulting in sweatshop labor conditions, first in our own back yard, then to central Europe, then south America, and now to Asia. But socio-political implications aside, I had to figure out how to get the motion of the sewing machines needle or speed of it’s motor translated into digital information that I could use to manipulate the human voice. I had a feeling I was going to need some cheap labor for this one.

Then, on the CTA, a billboard advertising a call for projects for the Segal Institute of Design at Northwestern University. This was an entry level class in design for young engineering students where you could present a design issue you needed solving and a team of students would come and try to solve it. Thus, the 3 Singers sewing machine was born.

A machine equipped with an infra-red sensor that simply tracked the motion of the thread arm of the sewing machine. Each time it passed by, a signal would be sent to my computer that I could use for multiple purposes. Sometimes triggering sounds, and sometimes cutting up the sound of the singers’ voice. An amazing project in its own rite, that class in the Spring of 2012 set the stage for what would be an 18 month experiment in human machine interaction (in a very literal sense).

But that was really just the tip of the iceberg in how this collaboration would evolve. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce to this blog, Fides Krucker. When talking about how we would go about developing the techniques that would be necessary, both in movement and sound, Erica and I realized that we would be asking singers to do very unconventional things and neither me or Erica had the specific training to help develop or cultivate such specific techniques. A friend of Erica’s in Toronto insisted we get in touch with Fides and after a quick skype chat from Iceland to Toronto (sorry, Iceland is for anther blog post that I should have done 2 years ago) we agreed that she would be the right fit.

It is tempting here to just tell the story of how this entire project developed, and it would be a long story with many details. More in fact, than I can possibly remember. As I pore over notebooks I realize that I could have likely used a personal video documentarian over the past 2 years to follow me around and document each moment so I could later remember what chickens came before what eggs, and exactly who laid them. Because in fact, this is not a work that I can take full credit for as a composer, even though my name appears by the word “composer” in quite a bit of the information going around out there in the world at the moment. So in this blog post, I am going to try to give my impression of how this work was created and who is responsible for it. Call it a memoir of a new collaborative practice. One in which even though I cannot claim full credit as composer, I am likely even more proud of than those efforts that I can claim full responsibility, for it was hard earned, and in the end, has the richness of many artistic minds working in tandem while, according to many, seeming like something one person set out to create and planned out from beginning to end. An accomplishment I think any artist should be extremely proud of in itself.

Every Opera (or Ballet piece) is a collaboration between different artists. There are librettists, poets, directors, dramaturgs, choreographers and set designers all working together to create one work, but in the end, usually it is the composer whose name is attached to such a work for posterity sake. The same is often true of works for the ballet stage. After all, you rarely hear about Nijinsky’s “Rite of Spring” or Cocteau’s “Oedipus Rex”, even though it is clear that those two artists had an essential role to play in the outcome of the Stravinsky’s musical scores. But in general, a differentiation can be made in these cases as despite the effect the narrative structure of these works had upon the eventual musical score, the music itself was purely the work of Stravinsky. Now fast forward 100 years, where multi-media work abounds, improvisation has made a comeback into musical form, and often times artists from different disciplines work together to create a work of art where one part depends on the other. Erica and I have been calling this “inter-dependent” performance and compositional practice but I am sure there are many different ways of referring to it out there.

We feel like our methods are fairly unique to how we work together. I had been looking for a collaborator like Erica for years and had found it in only a rare few musicians who were willing to go on a journey with me outside of the usual business model established by the classical music world. I found it for years in my collaboration with Jason Wampler (We Can and We Must) and then, on occasion with my sisters and brothers in Assemblage (Charles Waters, Andrew Barker, Shannon Fields), and the 12 Dimension Plane of Sound And Vision Orchestra (Shannon Budd, Erica Dicker, and Dan Peck) where musicians would dive head first into a process of mutual creation. In We Can and We Must, Wampler and I tried to find points of intersection where we were both creating one sound together as one mind. Weather it being morphing two sounds that we were controlling together or by one of us manipulating the sound the other was making live, there were many moments where we literally started becoming unaware of ourselves as individual musicians and would feel as if we had one mind with four hands and two voices. In assemblage and 12 Dimension Orchestra, I created a sound environment that would transform over the course of an improvisation giving my fellow musicians the score in real time in the form of audible feedback from their instrument and various combinations of instruments. The closest I have come to actually smelting live sound in a room. But given the intermittency of the latter two collaborations and the departure of Wampler for China in 2008, I was searching for a new direction.

Erica invited me to work with her on the Victory project and in 2011 we premiered the full company version at Northerly Island which featured several duet pieces that involved just her and I as performers. At first, I played my usual role of working off stage while she interacted with the sound on stage. Working with a Theremin attached to her body and a desk wired for sound where impacts against the desks surface would generate noise as well as triggering sounds. But then it became apparent that what we were doing had such a physical connection with me often prompting her to motion and her movement so often prompting me to reaction, she decided we needed to both be characters on stage. So I moved my setup to the back of the stage and she begin to give me choreographic instructions which eventually led to me being a “dancer” in the piece while simultaneously running the interactive patches that played and manipulated all the sound in the piece. Though I tried to follow instruction as much as I could during this process, there were times where I had to adjust the choreography for practical reasons as I could not physically do the things I needed to do performatively and also manage the choreography. At other times I would just find that I had a desire to hear something behave differently musically which then affected the way I would move. This fact at first was frustrating but once we realized that it was in response to the sound that my movement was most convincing, we ended up going with that as the driving force for my choreography. On the inverse of that, from the beginning, when Erica began to experiment with the “War Desk” (the desk that would explode with sound and visual response when she would throw herself against it) there was a constant back and forth regarding the content of the sound as well as the character of the movement including the rhythm of certain gestures, how the desk was struck, tapped, nudged, and what kind of materials were used to do said tapping and hitting. We would also experiment with different reactions and manipulations to the sound. In this way, Erica’s movement score would essentially create the live sound score simultaneously. Through this trial and error process, we would eventually develop a structure for a piece that had some room for in the moment improvisation but was ultimately the work of both Erica and I together. Though I had musical ideas that I presented, and Erica had movement and narrative materials she presented, the WAY these materials eventually appear in the piece is collaborative. So we in the end were both 50/50 composers and choreographers (or some other percentage thereof), rather than just one reacting to the others work after the fact.

With 3 artist engaging in this back and forth, things got more complex, but also much more interesting. The first time I actually met Fides in a room, and I applied microphones to the singers to have them first work with electronic manipulation of the voice, she said the 5 words that always make me cringe both as an electronic musician/composer and a sound engineer. “I don’t really like microphones”. My heart just about stopped. Here I was, going to embark on an extremely ambitious project dealing with the most sensitive instrument and situation you will ever deal with, that being the human voice, and the person I was going to be working with to get us through this delicate situation had just announced that they did not much like, pretty much everything I knew I was going to be trying to do to the voice and to the singers! Reflecting back now on those 5 words, I realize that the journey we were about to embark on, and one I am so happy we all stuck with, likely could not have begun any other way.

It would be a journey of discovery for all of us about what happens to the human voice when it is first given years of social and emotional conditioning (which I learned over the course of working with Fides is true not just for the female voice but also the male voice, but in very different ways), as well as what happens to the human voice when it hears itself in different contexts, especially when amplified and projected into a space. It forced me to really consider every assumption I had made about how everyone hears themselves when amplified or manipulated in some way and how to get other musicians, and especially singers, to hear, think, and feel the things I think and feel when performing in this way after having developed personal techniques over the course of 15 plus years as an electronic performer. In short she challenged me to re-consider how I thought of the interactive process, not just for vocalists, but for all types of performers, and in the process, gave me a whole new vocabulary through which to communicate the “technique” of interactive performance as it applies to my music and electronic techniques.

I came into the situation, really feeling the strain of having to develop new techniques and teach singers how to do the things I wanted them to, and what I learned from working with Fides and Erica on this project is how to discover what was already inside them. In fact, this process of devising is essential to the work that they have both done for the last many years. So, after many failed attempts to impose different processes or techniques onto the situation, I began to just listen. To approach the work with the same collaborative spirit I had approached Victory Project with and see where things went.

So in general, a giant pool of research was done by 3 artists and we each interpreted, discovered new tidbits, read different books, and shared our thoughts with one another. At times I would do my composerly “draft sketch” kind of thing to see if there was any resonance with the other artists and at other times I would just do small sketches of short sections. Often the ideas for these would come from Erica’s research, but at other times, it would be the result of material that Fides would develop in collaboration with the individual performer. For instance, each Singer in the Opera has a kind of “totem bird” that their character takes certain cues and direction from at certain points. Erica had the idea to give them this and worked with them in movement based on videos and recordings of these birds and then Fides had them kind of “notate” in their own shorthand a slowed down version of the bird so they could kind of create their own “human” version of the song, then I later decided to use these slowed down bird songs as a basis for a notated melody (I know, Messian already did that. Whatever) but all in the same key that then became actual “baroque” style Arias I wrote but that were further manipulated and stylized by Fides and whose presentation was choreographed by Erica. Then ideas of how to present and structure them in and amongst a factory setting in juxtaposition with physical portraits of the dancers relationship with a sewing machine were thrown around and more ideas about how these arias might return in the space later in the piece and how the clavichord accompaniment was reminiscent of the sewing machine (intentional on my part) so we should perhaps have the accompaniment kind of “duet” and switch off with the sewing machine performances. It was like how George Martin describes later sessions of The Beatles once they became a studio band. Everyone’s ideas were tried out. Some ideas flopped, but sometimes those flops led to more ideas. After a time, we learned each other’s languages well enough that we learned how to request something form one another’s realm without stepping on each other’s toes.

This is not to say that I became a vocal guru or Fides developed a full grasp of technical lingo or how a mixing board worked. That is not the point. The point is that we reached a consensus on what things meant and more importantly, we developed a TRUST between one another that allowed us to let our guard down as artists and professionals. We became close enough as collaborators that we were all allowed to say something stupid, all allowed to fail, and all allowed to say that we understood someone else’s idea but just could not do what the other wanted that particular day. No idea was disregarded. And THAT to me is the really important thing about this kind of collaboration. Developing that trust.

But that trust was not cultivated and achieved by just the 3 of us. There were many others who lent an outside eye to the work. First, there was Ginger Farley. Ginger offered to be Dramaturg but also general spiritual mentor for the work. Without her coming in with an objective perspective every month or so, and without her amazing “postit” charts summarizing the structure of the piece she was seeing formulate in disparate chunks before her, we would likely have never had the clarity to make it to the finish line. It was also very much her research that helped us decide what we were trying to say with the work and was her level head and voice of reason that got us through our most trying moments. Then there was John Boesche who was watching from afar most of the process to develop some spectacular video material but who also provided a steady professional perspective whenever we were getting lost in the process. His work projected onto the set (designed by Architect Leigh Breslau and stage and lighting designer Todd Clark) really gives the work its complete form.

Of course, when talking about a collaborative piece where materials are developed on particular performers, we can’t help but mention the performers as well. And in fact, in this case, we had 7 different performers train for the 3 roles, some of whom had intended to only help us through the development process, but whose contribution should not be under stated. Jenna Lyle, the only performer at the premier who will have been with us from the beginning, helped me greatly in developing initial manipulation techniques that I would use over the course of the piece as well as developing and perfecting the role of the Blue Grossbeak. Then there was Lara Oppenheimer who developed the role of the Rock Pigeon as well as engendering a very intimate relationship with the “Kinect Synth” I used to create some initial experiments and made us all see this interaction in a very human and personal way, going from hate, to acceptance, to absolute adoration and love. Then there was Maggie Mascal who developed the role of the Ruby Crowned Kinglet at set the stage for the boisterous, and celebratory as well as firm and charismatic nature of that part. With instruction from all of us, they created bird sounds, choreographed material that related to sewing machine sounds, and found individual “protests” and other songs that again were collaborations between the 3 lead artists and each individual performer. When eventually Lara was replaced as Rock Pigeon, first by Nadia Chana and then by Hope Littwin, and eventually Maggie was replaced by Katie Mazzini, these roles also changed slightly to match the particular tendencies of the performers’ individual voices and energetic states. Though the character of some of the section changed through this, it was clear that the structure we had developed upon which these performers could express their individual contributions was strong enough to withstand minor shifts in character. Like an opera interpreted by different singers and different conductors.

In the end, all of these contributions coalesce and blur together so it would be difficult to draw clear lines between the different contributions as it would also be difficult to give no credit to the performers, costume designers, video artists, engineers, interns, administrators, and many not for profit arts organizations who contributed to the end result of the work. But mostly I need to thank Erica and Fides, for putting up with my moods, having patience with my process (and my occasional lack of patience for theirs) and for putting so much effort and giving so much of themselves to a work that I hope will live far beyond the Krakow premiers we just had and Chicago premiers we have coming up.

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3 Singers premiers January 22nd at the National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago.

So, around 6 years ago now (wow, that long ago?) I was invited to take part in a very singular collaboration. Lou Mallozzi at Experimental Sounds Studio asked me to be a part of a team including Shawn Decker and Olivia Block to create a sound installation for the J. Pritzker Pavilion based on the sound of trains for the Chicago Humanities Festival. The only stipulations were that we were to try and keep the sounds as recognizable as possible and we had to work with the man who built the system itself, Jonathan Laney, to create and tweak a setting for the Pavilion’s sound system that carried the sound through the space in 5.1 surround. Kind of like a glorified (extremely glorified I might add) home theater system. Each of us went to work creating short vignettes that Lou then deftly mixed and edited together into a 25 minute or so sound piece entitled Train Time. We installed it in the fall of 2008 where it ran during humanities festival for a good couple of weeks every day. Spectators wandering through the park were serenaded with the sounds of trains literally moving across the space, juxtaposed with a myriad of processed and un-processed train whistles, screeches, and ambient sounds of insects and animals responding to those screeches. In general, the idea was to make the spectator feel like they were in a world that sounded real, but was not quite so. Where sounds moved in impossible dimensions against one another so if one closed their eyes, they would not necessarily know where the sounds came from or how they got there, but only that they were in a somewhat un-real sonic space filled with real sound. To achieve this, we worked very closely with Jonathan to strike a balance between the movement in the space reading and the sounds being equally distributed so that every seat in the house sounded nearly the same. For those who know a bit about psycho-acoustics and the way sound travels through space in general, this is no easy task. But thanks to the masterful design concept and attention to our artistic intent, we were able to get it to sound perfect, no matter where one sat.

This experience kind of opened up many questions for me and made me think hard about how I conceived of my live sound practices. In a situation such as the one at the Pritzker, where all the sonic energy is coming from the speakers, it is really possible to localize sound in interesting ways, even with musicians on stage? To create a sense of un-reality as convincing as the sense of ultra-reality created by the configuration for the Grant Park Symphony (though I would argue that feeling you are in a concert hall while sitting outside in downtown Chicago is also a sublimely un-real experience)? So I started to conceive of other things that could possibly be achieved in that space, all the while keeping in close contact with the ever approachable Jonathan Laney.

Sometime around 2010, after returning from a summer that found me in the north woods for 2 months (as well as China and northern California), I began having more and more conversations in the new music community. Much celebration was being prepared for the composer Steve Reich for the 2011 concert season for his 75th birthday and eighth blackbird and 3rd Coast Percussion were talking about a collaboration to do music for 18 musicians. I had been really excited about the opportunity to mix this seminal work and it became kind of an obsession of mine to dissect and analyze the piece in terms of its spatial possibilities. We were already planning a performance at the Park Avenue Armory in New York where we were going to have a multi-channel sound system built for us and the possibility of expanding on this idea in a more pristine environment seemed a recipe for something really great. Arts programmer Lacy Capps at the Department (once known as) of Cultural Affairs was approached and quickly took to the idea, actually proposing a 3 year trajectory in which a different composer was celebrated each year starting with Reich. This idea predictably fizzled out soon after the transition to DCASE (the other two would have been Glass and Cage by the way, can you imagine that !!!!!?????? A shame but I digress)……………

The result was the Steve Reich 75 birthday celebration in Millennium Park.

In many ways, Reich Fest was the ideal situation in which to experiment. The people involved in maintaining the Pavilion, are some of the best in the city, and besides that, are still extremely passionate about what they do despite year after year of being beset from all sides by crazy amounts of city wide festivals and private events creating long days during the summer that would easily burn out most crews. They look at my sometimes 50 + input riders, with limited soundcheck time, and without blinking an eye just kind of say, “lets do this”. Jonathan Laney has always figured out how to keep the system up and running despite budget difficulties and has remained open, receptive, and thoughtful in how to implement ideas within the bounds of what is currently possible. Without his presence and expertise, as well as willingness to offer his time to it, nothing like Reich Fest would have been possible. And I can’t forget to mention again, the amazing energy and trust of the two people who really made the whole thing happen, Cultural Affairs classical music programmer Lacey Capps, and eighth blackbirds absolute juggernaut of a managing director Jen Richards. Neither of these two were afraid to put their positions, reputations, and personal lives on the line and both had an extreme amount of trust in what was happening even though we were swimming in un-tested waters. Trust was what was needed, and it is what made the evening of August 26th 2011 so magical for everyone there. I wrote more about this show here.

Since that night, I have worked in the space with 3rd Coast Percussion, ICE, and Glenn Kotche in addition to doing 2 more shows with eight blackbird over the course of the 2013-13 seasons. Each year, we have explored different aspects of sound in space as well as different ways of approaching the programs. An all Varese concert, a concert that mixes electronic and acoustic works putting the audience in the middle of the band, putting different frequency ranges of the various instruments on stage into different parts of the space. But it occurred to me that so far, nobody has written music specifically for this system since 2008 when we first did Train Time. Strange, because it is such a completely singular sonic situation that one would have imagined it would have been explored for its creative potential, perhaps through a series of commissions or at least a call for works. And though Train Time was an achievement I am very proud to have been a part of, the interactive composer in me wanted to try and do more. After many years getting to know and understand how sound behaves in the space, I was finally presented with the opportunity to do so in the form of a piece I have been working on for Spektral Quartet entitled 4 X 4: 3 Birds.

4 X 4 is actually going to be a series of works for Quartets of different combinations, the first of which was written for 3rd Coast Percussion (though it was originally entitled Improvisation in an Altered State). The idea is that the quartet plays with amplification and their sound is transformed by simple space/time transmutation in some kind of 4 channel space (so a sound system with 4 speakers each driven by an independent source). Each player occupies a different space and has a slightly different relationship with time, so that the sounds they play are not only heard from different sectors of the space, but a pattern of delays, each unique to individual performers is heard within those sectors of space in different time relationships so the character of the generated sound from the stage changes over time. It is kind of like reading a quantum physics book but instead of formulas describing what is happening, sound is demonstrating it, if that makes more sense. In more human terms, I have been working with delayed sound as a performer for many years now (perhaps since I was a kid really), not just using electronics, but also just singing and making noise in highly reverberant spaces like big cathedrals and large open outdoor spaces. I am pretty obsessed with the idea that through sound, you can have a relationship with a continuum of your past experience and that that experience informs your future. In an exaggerated way, working with this relationship almost seems to predict your future when you improvise with it in that your next move is always the derivative (there I go with math talk again) of what has come before. It has to either fit or sharply contrast. Of course, everyone’s reaction to this will be different, but within one’s own experience, it begins to seem like music pours out of you in an inevitable way. This can apply to improvisation, but I also feel it can inform the phrasing and timing of notated music. When I listen to different versions of a Bach organ fantasy or perhaps a Brahms Intermezzo, I hear very different relationships with time being explored. In the case of Bach, specific timings in the form of tempo markings that we use today were not necessarily given and the micro-management of phrasing we have become accustomed to in 20th century music was not necessary because there were certain stylistic conventions of the time that would have informed the phrasing. With the advent of pre-recorded electronic music, and especially that which required performers to play along with a tape, precise and pre-meditated phrasing has become the norm and the freedom to interpret the music has been severely limited. Not that it hasn’t produced some fantastic music, but sometimes I feel like it has no natural breath. It is a snapshot of time and space that takes the performer out of the context of the current situation – a space/time that is fluid and malleable. (see a bit more on this here).

So, the 4 X 4 concept is one that I hope humanizes the technological experience. Allowing the players to develop their own relationship with the space/time present in the room and hopefully putting them in the same space as the audience so everyone present go on a journey together. Though for this one, I have written out a score, each player is free to play their parts with a certain amount of freedom as the harmonic material has some flexibility to it. They are encouraged to listen to how the space responds to their playing and make phrasing and timing decisions based on that intuition rather than exact timings. The melodies are derived from transcriptions of slowed down bird songs. These songs migrate from player to player in the quartet and therefor, migrate around the Pavilion as the piece unfolds.

But I am not going to do a harmonic analysis. I just wanted to give some context to what you will be hearing that Thursday night May 26th at 6:30. I am really happy that this piece will be premiered along-side another of Steve Reich’s masterpieces, Different Trains, as well as a new arrangement by my colleague and dear friend Katie Young. I am also happy that this will mark the debut to the Pritzker mixing console of Francisco Castillo Trigueros who will be working with the quartet on a spec(k)trally spatialized mix of the Reich. Hopefully many things that can be done with the space sonically will be revealed.

I truly hope you can make it out and while you are there, remember to look up. And despite the giant screen with all the disembodied figures displayed upon it, DO pay attention to that man behind the curtain!

(It is the music).

In a related story, I will also be joining my friends in eighth blackbird for a show on the 19th of June. Program including works by Bryce Desner and Michael Ward-Bergman who will also be on the stage with the group.

I am sitting in an airport in Seattle waiting for a flight back to Chicago, so I don’t have easy access to online or other resources to confirm any assertion I am making here, and after all, it’s a blog entry not a dissertation, so I will just apologize for any inconsistency or potential lack of cultural sensitivity in advance and try to keep my references vague. An easy task for me as anyone who knows me well can attest to.

I recall an idea I first heard when I was young that there are certain tribal cultures in the world that refuse to have their picture take because they believe that a photograph has the ability to steal one’s soul. I have often pondered this notion in terms of musical performance, especially with “improvised” music. As an improviser whose instrument happens to be a computer or other series of devices processing the sounds of other musicians- tandem mixing or tandem improvisation I like to call it – I have engaged in many sessions where I come together with others to attempt to capture a moment in time and space. In that time and space, we explore, we workshop, we react to and respond to the sound of the room, the energy and mood of each musician in the room at that moment, and the specific way the various signals flow together in the analog/digital soup that is my process of working. It is a process of discovery, and it is very dependent on the space, the musicians present, and even the energy of the audience in the case of live performance.

As a live sound designer for new music, I also engage in many different “moments”. Each venue is different and gives opportunity to explore repertoire from a different perspective as does the reaction of each audience as well as the temperament and feeling of the musicians at that time. Each performance represents a marker along a continuum of evolution for each musician according to the various activities they individually and collectively engage in from one performance to the next. And their attitudes toward that music definitely change over time. I think this is the MOST true of music we hold up as being “sacred” or “untouchable”. In a post show Q and A session conducted by eighth blackbird last night after the Kirkland, Washington performance of Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, the group was asked what music they played outside of eighth blackbird for their own enjoyment. Almost every member of the group mentioned that, on some level, they always return to Bach as music they are familiar enough with that they can experience it on a visceral level. Of course, as musicians that almost always memorize the music they play, they get the chance to internalize music so it becomes a part of their physiology. However, Bach represents a body of work that pretty much every classically trained musician in the world has grown up with from the time before they could read. It becomes perhaps a part of their blood as you might say.

I will come back to Bach, and our relationship to his music later. However, what really inspired me to get out the old laptop today was another question posed by the audience and the answer by percussionist Matthew Duvall. The question was about the Reich and the fact that the group plays against a recording of themselves playing the 2nd sextet. The question went something like, “how does the group reconcile the idea that you have this one set of instruments coming out of speakers, often hung from the ceiling above the proscenium, and then the live sextet playing on stage?” Matthew’s answer kind of took me by surprise. He explained how at first, we spent a lot of time and energy trying to match the tape as best as possible. In fact we did. We went so far as to ask the publisher for raw tracks instead of the pre-mixed track I was originally given so I could create a new mix in every hall and pan things the way I wanted to. We even considered placing speakers on stage to play back the tape part but this simply proved to be an un-tourable idea at the time. Reich himself famously jokes about this with his pre-recorded works such as Vermont Counterpoint and Different Trains, and light heartedly quips in interviews and panel discussions “it’s just the old slogan, ‘is it live or is it Memorex?’” We eventually settled on a certain working method, perhaps not completely ideal, but one that worked and was practical. But what he said next was what surprised me. He said that now, after years of touring it, he has become less and less attached to trying to match the recording with his playing, using different mallets than he chose for the recording and even not trying to match the style he played with at the time. Then the group began to talk about all sorts of things they were doing differently than they did on the recording such as playing certain phrases with a different emphasis and the winds and strings deciding to play “non-vibrato” while the recorded winds and strings are awash with it. They have started to think of it as a dialogue with a different time and place instead of an attempt to re-create that time and place. They started talking about embracing the tension that these differences caused rather than attempting to minimize the difference.

I must admit at this point that for years we struggled with trying to match the original recording. With a group as particular about their sound as eight blackbird is, finding ways to make that recording match them and vice versa was a big learning curve for me. Generally tape parts are some kind of manipulated or transformed sound or perhaps some altogether other sound world from what is happening on stage. In this case, it is just them coming out of the speakers, but in a different room with different mics and in the case of the piano and vibraphone, different instruments. The musicians also seemed to struggle with it as their attitudes about the music would change as time went on and those inflexible bastards who recorded the original tracks seemed to just truck on with the same attitude, like machines without souls. We had a short reprieve from this tyranny when the work was recorded for Nonesuch and the publisher again provided the raw tracks. At first I was convinced the improvement was due to adjustments made in the technique of recording with the tape part in mind as they planned to submit these tracks as the final published tape part for Reich’s publisher Boosey and Hawkes. Our first performance with these tracks was a revelation for the musicians as well as for me as everything could be heard more clearly and seemed to sound a bit more like what it was supposed to be. In essence, it was much easier to match the sound from the speakers to what they were playing on stage. But after just two performances with these new tracks, we took a long break from performing the piece with the tape part. The group had found a number of opportunities to perform the work with other musicians in various locations so both sextets were performing live. I have done sound for them in this situation as well and have found it to be significantly more satisfying than doing the work with the pre-recorded tape. Instead of a game of trying to match sounds, I am free to actually shape the sound of the entire ensemble in the way that really brings the music to the listeners’ ears and can treat the piece as a palate for expression rather than a game of chess with the room that I must win. The group also prefers the experience. But after 18 months since our last performance together with the tape part, here we were in Kirkland having the same difficulties we had during the years of first touring the piece with the original recordings. Of course, part of this is just not having done it in a while. Another aspect was that there were still problems with a “monitors only” track I had created from the raw tracks so that Matthew and Lisa would have a consistent track in their headphones to play with from show to show. We had some extra time, so I decided we would get to the bottom of what was troubling them with the track. Aside from being able to compress and EQ it slightly differently to make it clearer, we were also able to adjust certain balances based on what they wanted to hear at the time. The result was officially gauged as “8 million times better than before” by Lisa. But it brought up an important question for me. I wondered what might happen next time we play it. Will this new track still seem 8 million times better? Or will subtle changes in the situation, and in the player’s thinking and feeling cause them to want to hear it slightly differently again. Of course, dealing with changes in the acoustics on stage are always a variable, but beyond that, I think that changes in the state of mind of the musician could influence the perception of how that tape tracks work for them.

In this case, the tape captures a certain moment in time. A certain attitude or mentality in the way the piece should work that does not necessarily hold fast. Though the musicians will re-interpret the work based on a new insights and attitudes, the musicians they were at the time of the recording cannot engage in that dialogue. Intellectually, and emotionally, they will always stay the same and cannot evolve. In a certain way of thinking, they have no soul.

Back to Bach. I think the beauty of Bach, other than just his sheer genius as a craftsman and composer, is that at the time he was writing his masterworks, music was only notes. There were not dynamic markings, no expressive indications. Just notes. Again, I don’t mean to start a huge musicological debate here in the case that the previous statement is not entirely accurate, but certainly dynamic markings as we know them were not yet a thing. This left a lot of latitude for later generations to interpret his work. Of course, we can always engage in historical research to study the performance practices Bach would have been aware of to inform our interpretation of these notes, but we can also ignore this historical performance practice if we wish. For the most part, musicians have attempted to reference baroque performance practices in their playing, but those that have chosen to approach the music in a different way, putting their own interpretive signature on it, have created some of the most moving and engaging performances and recordings of this work. In a way, you could say that by allowing us to continually re-interpret his work in our modern context, Bach’s music has retained its life. Retained its soul. There is no one interpretation we have universally held up as the end all be all example of how Bach should be played. I would also hazard a guess, though I have never taken an official survey, that most musicians feel much differently about recordings they make of Bach or any other composers music as time goes on and they continue to play that music. I have heard musicians say as much on many occasions. I know that as an improviser, I generally become less engaged with particular recordings as time passes and I loose a mental connection to that time and place. Improvisers often talk about “the moment” being something that is sacred in performance. In classical music, I think we have this concept sometimes that we want to interpret music in a way that is “most accurate to the composers wishes”, but the more I engage with live performers, I feel like for music to live beyond a certain time and place, we must relinquish a certain amount of control over it. Letting musicians engage creatively, and giving them the freedom to do so is essential to the longevity of the music. The music leaves the composers mind, and pen, onto a sheet of paper, and only once it comes out of the musician does it truly come to life. A score is perhaps like some kind of genetic code that then grows into a human being who is then further altered by their life experience.

For me, the beauty of Reich’s music, is that despite being very strictly notated, it is mostly about a pure process and structure and does not include or require an excessive amount of dynamic or expressive markings. The repetition of small phrases and their subtle transformation over time draws the audience and performer into an alternate relationship with time and space. It is like a fabric that changes each time you look at it depending on the lighting or how close or far away you are, and what portion of it you are focusing on. Therefore musicians will always find new meaning in it and as the means of distributing sound through a space become more advanced, we sound engineers will find different ways to deliver each part of that fabric to the ears of the listener, thus engaging in that dialogue that keeps the music alive and gives it a soul. So many music groups when performing Reich’s works with recorded tape such as Vermont or New York Counterpoint have chosen to record their own tape parts rather than the one that comes with the published score. Generally the reason I hear is that they feel it is difficult to match the sound on the tape part, but it also definitely has to do with the fact that they want the ability to put their expressive stamp on it. I also note that almost every musician I know who has done so has become dissatisfied with the recording they made in some way and want to do it again after a few performances. In the case of eight blackbird, and Double Sextet, in the 4 short years we have toured the piece, I feel like each performance is a new discovery of the work and we definitely notice the change in our attitude in the fact that we have a tape part, recorded in a different time and place, as a mirror that reflects this change.

So I guess my answer to the overall question of this post is a qualified yes. Recording DOES steal the soul of music. But it is not my intention here to label all recording, or music that uses a recorded part as something that should be avoided. Quite the contrary! I just thought it something worth talking about. Especially now as we plunge into an era where the documentation of performances, as well as every other moment of our daily lives, becomes more and more ubiquitous in our culture. I think it is important to find ways to keep the things we record alive and to keep a perspective on the fact that a recording really does not give us the full picture of what a work of art, a life, or a moment, really is.

ABOUT

Ryan Ingebritsen is a composer, sound designer, sound artist, electronic musician, and sound engineer whose artistic activities spill over from one world to another. Through all of his artistic activities, he collaborates with musicians, dancers and live performers to create interactive and site specific solutions that enhance expressive possibilities of sound through modes of interaction and utilize spaces and sound systems as instruments in an ensemble. Ingebritsen has distinguished himself as an artistic partner in all of his collaborations and has become an integral part of the new music scene that has exploded in Chicago over the past 10 years. His work has taken him to Europe, Asia, and Australia and he has worked and had his work presented in premier venues throughout the US such as the Park Avenue Armory in New York and the J Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago working with groups such as eighth blackbird, International Contemporary Ensemble, Third Coast Percussion, and choreographers such as Erica Mott, Ginger Farley, and Sarah Shelton-Mann.